On Lexie’s first day of kindergarten, the sun shone bright and hazy in the morning sky. She walked with her sister along the gravel road, humidity already making the air a thick soup. Tall oaks and maples rose above the honeysuckle and blackberry bushes, and a dry creek bed curved back into the tangle of underbrush. Mama had offered to go with them down the quarter-mile of gravel, but Lila said no; she’d watch out for her little sister. Lexie was proud to walk beside Lila, who was beautiful already at the age of ten. She had golden skin, shimmering hair, and a laugh that shook the world.

Over her shoulder Lexie carried a brown satchel filled with empty notebooks, sharpened pencils, perfect crayons and markers, and a new pink eraser with square corners, unblemished by mistakes. She wore the sleeveless sundress Mama had sewn for her, with large orange and yellow flowers. On her feet were her favorite tan canvas sandals; she tried hard not to scuff her toes against the gravel. The world felt glorious, and Lexie was finally entering it, leaving Mama behind with Papa’s ghost.

The gravel drive sloped up to meet the tar-and-chip country road. In the orange sunlight, the girls waited under a shade tree beside the broken-down fence. Weeds swayed in the breeze, tall among the tiger lilies, goldenrod, black-eyed susans, and Queen Anne’s lace.

They lived in a rambling old farmhouse, rough and unfinished, tucked away at the end of a gravel road too insignificant to be named. “Got it for a song,” Papa used to say, before he went to heaven.

The bus arrived amid a rumbling of gears and a popping of brakes, brushing the sisters with a gust of hot wind. Lexie went first, straining to reach the first step as she pulled herself up by the shiny metal handrail. At the top sat the bus driver, a fat woman in a knit blouse and jeans,  cooled by a tiny fan hanging from the ceiling and pointed at her. She had dark-rimmed glasses and tightly permed brown curls. She smiled, and her painted lips parted to show small, crooked teeth.

“Well, who is this?” she asked, squinting at Lexie with alarming shortsightedness.

“Hello, Imogen,” said Lila. “This is my sister, Lexie.”

“Welcome, Lexie!” Imogen said. “Find yourself a seat and sit upon it!”

The doors slapped shut, and Lexie stumbled as the bus pulled away. She glanced nervously at the row of faces looking back at her. She and Lila slid onto a green vinyl bench, and the sweat from their legs stuck to the seat. The windows were opened their full six inches. Lila squeezed Lexie’s sweating leg through the fabric of her dress, and Lexie felt her sister’s confidence wash through her like a gentle rain.

The bus crossed the highway and followed roads along the edges of woods, past fields of corn and placid cows flicking narrow tails at flies. They bumped through a trailer park and picked up four more children. They rumbled past empty pastures and stopped at a cluster of homes to pick up a brown-haired boy. They turned onto a street with a green road sign, passing houses built close together. Lexie gazed out the window at these fancy homes with brick siding and porches that weren’t falling down.

Finally they pulled into town, passing the old graveyard, with its spot-encrusted headstones, and the city bank. They bumped across the train tracks and past the hospital where she’d been born, and the library, where Mama took them every week. The school sat in the center of town, in a neighborhood of large houses and shade trees.

Lila left Lexie among a clutch of small children filing into the kindergarten classroom and traipsed off happily toward the opposite end of the building. Lexie stepped inside the dark room, where a solitary fan the size of a car tire pointed towards the center. The kindergarteners arranged themselves in a circle on the rug in front of their teacher, a jolly-looking, heavy-set woman. Some of the children looked around uncertainly, some sat stone-faced, a few squirmed with excitement. One girl threw up on her shoes and had to be led away to the office. One boy kept jumping up and pacing and had to be reminded to sit down while the teacher read them a story.

Lexie’s eyes wandered over the crescent of faces. One little girl, pale with a smattering of freckles, stared back at her with red, wet eyes. She had pretty hair pulled back tightly in braids and a blue dress with a white collar and capped sleeves. The girl wept in despair, wanting to go home. Lexie couldn’t understand why the teacher didn’t notice her. Maybe she was too distracted by the restless boy, who was once again pacing the room (“Sit down, Doug, we’re about to find out what happens to Pooh and Piglet!”). But now that Lexie had noticed the girl, she couldn’t look away. She gazed into the girl’s eyes, and all at once her own confidence and excitement melted away. Hot tears fell from her eyes, and she began sobbing in loud gasps.

The teacher stopped badgering Doug and stared at them both in alarm. She shooed them down the hall to the office before their despair could infect the other children.

One of the secretaries handed Lexie a tissue. The girl who’d thrown up on her shoes sat waiting for someone to collect her. Lexie sat there, feeling very sorry for herself.

Then Lila walked in, summoned from her class. Lila had every reason to be annoyed with Lexie, sobbing so childishly on her first day of school. Any other sister would have scowled at her and called her a crybaby. But Lila greeted her cheerfully: “Hello, Doll.” She touched Lexie’s shoulder, and immediately Lexie stopped crying. The other girls from her class still sniffed softly, and Lexie felt sorry for them; they had no one, while she had her sister. Those two girls went home, but Lexie went back to class.

On that first day of school, they had one short recess in the morning. At 10 a.m. sharp, the kindergarteners pushed out onto the hot pavement in a cloud of confusion, deciding where to play. Lexie wanted to try the monkey bars, but she didn’t like the idea of other kids looking up the skirt of the dress Mama had spent the summer making, so she waited with a girl named Lisa for a turn on the swings. Lexie felt neat and shiny in her new dress as she went about the business of making friends.

At the other end of the playground, she could see Lila standing in the center of a group of girls with her best friend, Bethany. The older girls flocked around Lila, drawn to the shiny brightness within her—“charisma,” Mama called it. She and Bethany stood together, whispering secrets and laughing at private jokes. The others formed a corona around them.

Because of their age difference, Lexie resembled a doll version of Lila, and that was how she had gotten her nickname. Lexie couldn’t wait for the day when she would turn into her older sister. Lila radiated internal sunlight, causing everyone to smile. “Your daughter is so pretty,” people told Mama, and Lexie knew they meant Lila. She waited for her own internal sunlight to appear, so that people would call her beautiful too.

A group of older girls stepped into line behind her, laughing to themselves. Lexie didn’t pay them any attention until she heard one of them say, “…showing up to school in a dress made out of curtains.”

Did they mean her? She glanced around and saw one of the girls smirking at her. She was a head taller than Lexie and wore a purple shirt with a rainbow across the chest. Two other girls stood behind her, staring at Lexie over their friend’s shoulder.

Lexie’s new friend, Lisa, glanced back at them nervously, then at Lexie, and then away.

“Your Mommy sew that for you?” the big girl asked with a grin.

Lexie nodded dumbly.

“Where’d she get that fabric? The 1960s?”

Lexie stared down at the dress. “I dunno…” she said.

She glanced around and saw two kinds of faces: ones who watched and grinned, and ones who looked away and pretended not to see. She stared down at her feet. She didn’t know how to talk to meanness.

Someone stepped up beside her, and the big girl’s attention shifted. Lexie turned and saw Lila.

“Hi, Donna,” Lila said, without looking at Lexie. “I’m surprised to see you waiting for the swings. Don’t you usually just push your way in?”

Donna smirked. “I was going to, but this one’s dress was so bright, I thought I was going blind.”

“Oh!” Lila said. “I’m so glad you like it. My mom worked hard on it.”

Donna appeared baffled for a moment, before looking Lexie over and noticing the resemblance between the two sisters. Her smile faded. “Uh, yeah,” she said. She glared back at her friends, who were suppressing giggles. “It’s very…colorful.”

Lila smiled. “Were you waiting for the swings, Donna?”

“Uh…no.”

“Okay. Well, I’m going to push my sister, then.”

For several minutes, Lexie tried to enjoy the sense of flying, the flip of her stomach when she started to fall back to earth. But she kept going over what Donna had said about her dress.

When she finally climbed off the swing, Lila waved at her and headed back to her friends. Lexie looked around, but she didn’t see Lisa anymore. She was hot and sweaty, with grime tucked into the folds of her palm. Her shadow sprawled across the pavement.

Bushes had embedded themselves in the latticework of the chain-link fence bordering the blacktop. Lexie gravitated toward the shade there and watched the bright flash of the other children. She listened to their cries, sometimes joyful, sometimes aggrieved. Crushed berries stained the pavement at her feet. Lexie lifted one sandal and studied its underside, stained with circles of black.

A sharp pain struck her face, knocking Lexie to the ground. She raised her fingers to her cheek, then pulled them away, wet with juice. No, not juice. Another stone hit her shoulder, and she looked up from the hot pavement and saw Donna grinning at her.

Lexie held an ice pack against her cheek for the rest of the morning until she climbed aboard the bus for home. Mama was waiting at the end of the gravel drive and looked startled by Lexie’s soiled dress, and by the red slash across her flaming cheek.

“A rock hit me,” Lexie said simply, and Mama nodded, saying nothing.

Lexie didn’t know anyone else like her mother. She had hair so long that she could sit on it when she loosed it from its thick braid. When she washed it, a whole day passed before it dried. She had a bump on her nose that held up her glasses and a slightly drooping eyelid that made her seem sleepy. She spent hours in her garden, and baked her own bread, and canned her own vegetables. She wore cut-off shorts and a tall floppy hat to shield her from the sun.

They walked homeward. The road was hot and bright, without a canopy of trees. The dry creek bed sprouted Queen Anne’s Lace, with a single drop of blood right in the middle of each flower—where the queen had pricked her finger, Mama said.

“How was school?” she asked.

Leaving aside everything that had happened, Lexie said, “Good.”

“Is your teacher nice?”

“Yes.” She thought it might be true. It was too soon to tell.

“Did you make any friends?”

“No.”

“Well,” Mama said after a pause, “maybe tomorrow. You have lots of time. Did you see Lila while you were there?”

“No,” Lexie said.

A lie, of course. Lila had said that lying to Mama sometimes was okay, but never to each other. The first time Lexie had lied to her sister, it had left a weight on her heart. And it was only a little lie: she’d claimed not to remember something about Papa, so that Lila would tell her the story again.

The rising pulse of the dog-day cicadas drowned out everything else, until they stopped to breathe, only to pick up their cry again. From somewhere nearby a blue jay scolded. The grass grew so tall that it dipped, fat and full. The sun blared constant light onto the distant trees.

Their feet raised dust on the road. The gravel bit into the soles of Lexie’s sandals. Finally the house came into view, its flaking paint half scraped off in anticipation of a new coat that hadn’t come.

Lexie climbed the dusty stairs to her room, pulled the dress over her head, and took a long look at it. It was dotted now with purple smears across the yellow and orange flowers. Some things couldn’t be fixed, she knew. She crumpled it and shoved it into the back of her closet.

When she came downstairs in her playclothes, the kitchen was still and empty. Lexie knew Mama would be in the garden behind the house. She was most like Before Mama in her garden. Everyplace else, she was After Mama—wandering listlessly through the house, starting a load of laundry in the dark basement, then forgetting to move it to the dryer and washing it again upon discovering that the clothes were damp and moldering. Soaking plates and cups in the chipped enamel sink before grabbing a broom to sweep the floor, leaving the dishes until the water grew cold and gray. She might vacuum half the rug in the living room before deciding to empty all the wastebaskets, abandoning the vacuum in the center of the room like a solitary skyscraper. Sometimes in the grocery store she froze in the middle of an aisle, having forgotten her list, or forgotten to make one. Lexie could touch her fingers to some loose sugar pooled on a shelf and lick them clean, the sweetness like forbidden candy, and Mama wouldn’t notice or scold her the way Before Mama would have.

This was why Lexie, despite everything, liked school, which had been bright and loud but perfectly ordered. Home was quiet and disorderly, and After Mama’s behavior was confusing, frightening, and frustrating. Lexie was five; she had no patience for grief.

Mama’s sunhat was a battered straw thing with a torn rim. Her arms tanned throughout the summer until they were baked brown like bread. Lexie went outside and studied her as she bent over the weeds around her tomato plants. So many green tomatoes, round and tight, with tiny yellow flowers promising more. Mama’s thick braid swayed over her shoulder as she moved, plucking at things.

Lexie called out “Mama!” three times before she heard. She looked up, hands frozen, dazed for a moment. Then her eyes settled on Lexie. She straightened and took a kerchief from her back pocket, wiping it across her face. It left a streak of dirt on her cheek, like the red blossom on Lexie’s face.

“Mama,” Lexie said yet again, “I’m hungry.”

“Of course you are,” Mama said, smiling apologetically. “I forgot.”

She came forward, peeling her gloves off one finger at a time and then dropping them carelessly on the grass.

Lexie rushed forward to embrace her, but Mama held her away. “It’s too hot to hug,” she said.

Lexie wanted to cry. It should never be too hot to hug your daughter.

In the house, Lexie was momentarily blinded by the dark. The window in the kitchen faced away from the sun, except in its early-morning flush. Lexie’s eyes slowly adjusted, and she saw the kettle left on the stove from breakfast. Half a loaf of bread rested on the cutting board, its crumbs dusting the counter. Unwashed dishes lay cold in the sink.

Lexie hadn’t been in many other homes, but she thought hers wasn’t normal. In the storybooks she checked out at the library, beds were always made, kitchens were always clean, living rooms had perfectly centered rugs with cats asleep on them. Even in books where the houses were messy, everyone would clean up together. There was always a point to the untidiness, and that was to make things tidy. Lexie didn’t understand the point of her house.

Mama sliced two neat pieces of bread from the loaf and laid them on a plate. She rooted around in the cupboards and refrigerator while Lexie thought about how hungry she was. Finally Mama slammed the fridge door shut. “I’m out of jelly,” she said. “Are you okay with just peanut butter? I’ll have to go to the store later. I’d better write it down.”

But she didn’t write it down, or listen to Lexie’s answer.

Lexie sat down to wait. She faced the blank television in the living room and wished there was a cat sleeping on the rug or, better yet, rubbing against her, demanding to be petted, missing her while she was at school, even though she hadn’t been gone very long.

At last Mama presented her with a peanut-butter sandwich, accompanied by a few tiny strawberries from her garden and a sliced banana, slippery and past its prime. Lexie ate silently, her mouth so dry from the peanut butter that she drank all of her milk before she finished her sandwich. She mashed the banana into a paste and smeared it across the plate so that she wouldn’t have to eat it. Mama wouldn’t notice.

Lexie listened to the sucking sounds of the sink draining and the rush of new water refilling it. She listened to plates and cups thumping around the tub, the faucet shushing on and off as Mama rinsed them, and then the clattering in the dish rack.

“Where’s Lila?” Mama called over her shoulder. “Is she at Bethany’s?”

“No, Mama. She’s not home from school yet.”

“Of course.” Mama laughed with her shoulders. “I keep thinking it’s still summer. I’m not used to you being in school.”

Lexie’s mouth felt dry and sad from the peanut butter. A logjam of tears was clogging her throat, and suddenly they burst through. She began to sob in long wracking gasps. She touched her fingers to her cheek, and they came away wet, with tears this time.

Mama came over and touched her shoulder.

Lexie looked up at her. “A girl said my dress was ugly!” she wailed.

Mama looked down sadly, a pained smile on her face. She opened her arms wide and said, “Come here, Lexie.”

Lexie sprang up, and Mama folded long, sun-soaked arms around her. Lexie closed her eyes and melted into her. Mama rocked back and forth, swaying with her for several minutes. She stroked Lexie’s sweaty hair and said into her ear, “God, how I love you.”

The hardness buried deep in Lexie’s chest released, and she forgot everything but the softness of her mother, remembering this ordinary, magical love.

When Lila came home, hours later, she changed out of her school clothes and said nothing to Mama about Lexie crying in the office; it would be their secret.

They headed out to play until dinner, stopping first to touch the Dad Tree in the side yard. Lexie rested her palm against its rough bark and patted it three times. That tree was her friend; it understood her. Lila put her arms around its narrow trunk as though embracing it. It wasn’t very tall or very large, but it cast a long shadow. In the winter, stripped of its leaves, the Dad Tree appeared asleep, or dead. “Bereft,” Lila called it. Now it was leafy and warm.

“Let’s go to the orchard,” Lila said. “I think King James might be back from fighting the dragon.”

“What if he isn’t?” Lexie asked anxiously. “What if a dragon followed him home? What if Princess Delilah and Princess Alexandra are in trouble?”

“Maybe they’ll have to save the kingdom themselves!” Lila said, eyes wide with excitement.

Mama didn’t know about the orchard—it was another secret between the girls. They had discovered it by accident one day, stepping out into a cluster of short bushy trees, a mush of rotten apples at their feet, the air sickly sweet and filled with lazy bees. It had become one of their favorite places to play. Some days they were wild mustangs, running free on the western plains. Sometimes they were unicorns in a magical forest, or fairies, or dwarves, or elves. They conjured bows and arrows, defending themselves from trolls and goblins.

Eventually Lila settled on the idea of being princesses: Princess Delilah and Princess Alexandra. Mama was the queen, and their father became King James, off fighting dragons or going on quests. They told tales of his bravery and sang songs of his adventures while they waited for his return.

He’d only been gone a year, but Lexie had forgotten what Papa’s laughter sounded like. It was hard to hold onto memories at five: she didn’t know what was important, when everything was still so new. Lila remembered a lot more, but she told the same stories over and over again, and they were worn smooth from the telling.

The orchard was a secret place just for them. If Lexie let it slip that they traveled so far from the house, Lila warned, Mama would never allow them out of her sight. “And wouldn’t that be a shame?” Lila said. “If we could never play in the orchard again?” So Lexie kept quiet.

That night, at dinner, Mama didn’t want to talk. The television was on for noise, turned down low. She served the chicken in silence and spooned out the green beans without a word, holding the spoon out, waiting for a plate to receive it. She forked dark red wedges of watermelon onto everyone’s plate. Through the whole meal, she said only, “Eat,” and “Do you want more?” and “Yes, you can be done.”

After dinner, Lila changed the channel on the TV to something with a laugh track and turned it up. Lexie stayed in the kitchen. She thought Mama would be happier with someone there—someone beside Papa’s ghost, who didn’t really count. Lexie remembered when Before Mama had been happy and sang to them. After Mama was always sad, and scared that more bad things would happen. Lexie missed the evenings when they had all watched television together after dinner, when Papa was home, even though he often fell asleep.

That night, when Mama came in from the kitchen and sat down, Lexie curled up next to her on the couch and rested her head against her shoulder, listening to the fast thump of her heart.

Mama said gently, “Lila, take Lexie for a bath before she falls asleep.”

Lila helped her undress and climb into the bath. She scrubbed Lexie with soap and ran her fingertips through her hair, making her scalp tingle. The old tub had a rubber stopper on a chain, and as Lila moved a washcloth along her back, Lexie tried to pull it out with her foot. Her toes puckered in damp ridges. “Pits, tits, and lady bits!” Lila joked, and Lexie laughed. Mama used to say that, back when she’d wash Lila and Lexie together, back Before.

Up in Lexie’s room, Lila checked under the bed for monsters, then opened the closet and checked there as well. Lexie’s walls were pink because there was insulation but no drywall. Plastic covered the pink to keep the fiberglass from getting into the room and onto her skin. The floors were rough still, needing to be sanded down and stained. They wore shoes everywhere upstairs so that they wouldn’t get splinters, except in Lila’s bedroom; hers was the only floor that had been finished.

That was why, in the previous year, on the night when Mama’s scream had woken Lexie—a deafening howl, wild and dark—and Lila had come running into Lexie’s room, she didn’t have shoes on and got splinters in her feet. Mama pulled them out with tweezers and shaking hands, while Lila cried. Mama was crying too, because Papa was dead.

Four-year-old Lexie cried with them, even though she didn’t really understand that “dead” meant Papa wasn’t coming home. Mama held a hand to her chest, as if something there had broken. Lila spent the rest of that night in Lexie’s bed, pressed up next to her, the two girls curled together like shrimp.

In 2020, I wrote a novel with a narrator who created a story about two sisters, the older of whom disappears one day and leaves the younger one behind. Last year I decided to write the story of those sisters, and I asked myself two questions: (1) What compelled the older sister to strike out on her own? and (2) What happened to the sister left behind? I intended to write a story without the complications of an extended family, which resulted in a mystery about the lack of an extended family. I also wanted a setting that harkened back to my rural upbringing, so I created a story with vivid surroundings that ended up feeling almost like another character.

All of Lexie’s earliest memories center on her older sister Lila—like the day they slipped through the barbed-wire fence into the horse pasture, or the night when Papa died. Lexie barely remembers a time when Mama wasn’t sad, a time before the day when the house filled with sympathizers dressed in black, and an unnamed woman smoked a cigarette on the back porch and drove off in a huff when Mama refused to speak to her.

All Lexie’s ever wanted is to be like Lila, who is beautiful and charismatic and moves through life with determination. Teachers love her, other girls admire her. But all Lila’s ever wanted is to see the world and learn about Mama’s mysterious past. She searches their house for clues in photo albums and digs around in the cold, dark basement for old letters. Lexie doesn’t care about any of that. She’s satisfied playing in the woods behind the house, watching Lila sketch the treehouse Papa built, or—eventually—helping their new stepfather, Patrick, gradually restore the old farmhouse while his steady presence knits their shattered family back together.

As far as Mama’s concerned, the world is a scary place to be entered cautiously. But Lila approaches everything with breakneck enthusiasm; boundaries exist only to be breached, and “no” is never the last word. The last good memory Lexie has of Lila, before she graduated and escaped into the wide, scary world, is the day when Lila rescued Lexie from Junior High in her little red car and drove her all over town, to places Lexie hadn’t even known existed. “Just be yourself,” Lila told her then, “and the people who matter will love you.”

After Lila leaves, Lexie searches for a new role model, and one appears on her first day of high school, in the shape of Meg, a beautiful, opinionated girl with enough family drama to rival Lexie’s. They become fast friends, though Meg’s unpredictable moods put Lexie on edge. Gradually, as she struggles to navigate the world without her sister, Lexie begins to doubt everything Lila has ever told her about herself and their family.